In a drive which we took into the country, we had occasion to admire the much talked of verdure and ornamental cultivation of England.  Green hedges, rich fields of grass sprinkled with flowers, beautiful residences, were on every side, and the wheels of our carriage rolled over the smoothest roads in the world.  The lawns before the houses are kept smoothly shaven, and carefully leveled by the roller.  At one of these English houses, to which I was admitted by the hospitality of its opulent owner, I admired the variety of shrubs in full flower, which here grow in the open air, rhododendrons of various species, flushed with bloom, azaleas of different hues, one of which I recognized as American, and others of various families and names.  In a neighboring field stood a plot of rye-grass two feet in height, notwithstanding the season was yet so early; and a part of it had been already mown for the food of cattle.  Yet the people here complain of their climate.  “You must get thick shoes and wrap yourself in flannel,” said one of them to me.  “The English climate makes us subject to frequent and severe colds, and here in Lancashire you have the worst climate of England, perpetually damp, with strong and chilly winds.”

It is true that I have found the climate miserably chilly since I landed, but I am told the season is a late one.  The apple-trees are just in bloom, though there are but few of them to be seen, and the blossoms of the hawthorn are only just beginning to open.  The foliage of some of the trees, rich as it is, bears the appearance in some places of having felt the late frosts, and certain kinds of trees are not yet in leaf.

Among the ornaments of Liverpool is the new park called Prince’s Park, which a wealthy individual, Mr. Robert Yates, has purchased and laid out with a view of making it a place for private residences.  It has a pretty little lake, plantations of trees and shrubs which have just began to strike root, pleasant nooks and hollows, eminences which command extensive views, and the whole is traversed with roads which are never allowed to proceed from place to place in a straight line.  The trees are too newly planted to allow me to call the place beautiful, but within a few years it will be eminently so.

I have followed the usual practice of travellers in visiting the ancient town of Chester, one of the old walled towns of England, distant about fifteen miles from Liverpool—­rambled through the long galleries open to the street, above the ground-story of the houses, entered its crumbling old churches of red freestone, one of which is the church of St. John, of Norman architecture, with round arches and low massive pillars, and looked at the grotesque old carvings representing events in Scripture history which ornament some of the houses in Watergate-street.  The walls are said to have been erected as early as the time of William the Conqueror, and here and there are towers rising above them.  They are still kept